Male Sexual Assault Victims are not just played for Laughs

The YouTube Channel Pop Culture Detective has a video titled Sexual Assault of Men Played for Laughs Part 2 Female Perpetrators.  It’s a pretty exhaustive and seemingly thoughtful analysis of all the ways Male Sexual Assault is played for Laughs in media. 

However it is unhelpful in actually making progress on how Male Sexual Assault Victims are thought about and treated in society by only focusing on when it’s played for laughs.  Because he denies that it’s actually a “Double Standard” in any way while also emphasizing how allegedly rare it is.

Like by saying “Rape of Women isn’t taken seriously either” followed by a Quagmire clip. That Family Guy scene is an example of Dark Comedy, like most comedy involving women being raped by men, I don’t like these kinds of jokes but I’m not gonna pretend they are something else, that what’s happening is something everyone considers horrible and traumatizing is vital to the joke working as intended.  All these men being raped by women scenes the video documents are not Dark, they are instead treating the the entire idea of this happening as an absurdity.

But early in the video came the real warning sign of the video's problem.  Yes all these scenes are acknowledging that what the woman is doing is morally and ethically wrong.  Therefore he concludes the problem has nothing to do with people refusing to condemn a woman’s actions.

The problem is there is plenty of Male Sexual Assault in media that isn’t played for Laughs, sometimes a scene happens that almost everyone would call Rape if the genders were reversed, but instead is not only not considered Rape but if any moral judgment is passed on what happened at all it will entirely be that the Man did something wrong to the Woman.

The big example of this in my mind is episode 9 of School Days, which I've talked about before.  Early on it shows how a Girl inviting a Boy to the “rest area” is supposed to go.  Otome doesn’t do that but drags Makoto there, confesses and then assaults him before he can fully respond and then his eyes go weird, the Hentai visual language of Mind Break.

This is very obviously a Rape scene to me.  But because the popular narrative around this show as a whole is that Makoto is a selfish indecisive womanizer who deserves what happened to him at the end no one is willing to even consider the possibility that he was ever the Victim in the first 11 episodes.

That’s just the most blatant example, he had previously been kissed while sleeping and I frankly consider his consent to everything he does with Kotonoha in the last episode questionable at best.

Then I often think about the movie Poison Ivy: The New Seduction, where in one sequence Violet seduces Joy’s boyfriend by taking advantage of his Drug Addiction.  And one online review I read a long ago found laughable the notion that we’re supposed to feel sorry for him when he calls her out on that later.

DC Comics is filled with examples of Villainesses raping Superheroes but the writers being very inconsistent on if they want to acknowledge his lack of consent.  Most notoriously being hot Grant Morrison retconned Talia.

Update July 2024: Going back to School Days, in the VN it's Kotonoha who rapes Makoto.

In the scenario that comes from episode 5 being The Video Tape Kotonoha repeatedly assaults Makoto on the train against his protests, and once starts jerking him off while he's still asleep, and more.  Twice in these scenes a prompt will come up for the player but our options are only say no or nothing, no option to actually consent.

In a scene leading up to Bavarois/Lust after he tells her he loves Sekai and wants to break up she undresses in-front of him and tells him to touch her and when he doesn't she walks over and forces his face in her breast.

The issue today with how society treats Female on Male Rape is less a denial that it's theoretically possible and more having a different barrier to considering that's definitely what happened.  When it's a male assaulting a female at least most self described Feminists understand that any Consent given after an encounter begins as non consensual is dubious.  But in the scene I just talked about will go "look how easily he starts sucking on them" but I'm like "he barely even looks aware of his surroundings".

Then there is the matter of SA victims themselves often not being willing to recognize that's what happened to them.  And for male victims an added reason for that is this very double standard.  But because people enter this franchise with such a baseline cynical view of Makoto it's easy to go "even he admits he did something wrong...." when that's not how human psychology works, people feel guilty about things that aren't their fault all the time.

Update November 2024: Makoto is also a victim of Statutory Rape in Summer Days/Shiny Days.  And at first I thought the Game wasn't taking that as seriously.  But then I realized the parallelism if Futaba seeing Makoto with Youko in the MILF route timeline and Makoto seeing Futaba with Shun in most timelines if you make it to episode 4.  That tells me the writers do see them as the same.

Futaba never admits to seeing herself as a victim in her relationship with Shun, in fact in the present she's the one actively seeking to continue it while he's trying to cut it off, which makes it easy for a cynical viewer to see her as some pervert's fantasy of a totally willing underage girl.  But we don't see how her relationship with Shun started, it's the content locked behind the MILF routes that hints at the true subject.  Specifically the version of the "Captivated by the Twins" ending predicated on Futaba answering Karen's phone and Makoto at first assuming it's Kazuha.

Futaba's interpretation of what she saw is that Youko is seducing and taking advantage of Makoto.  So no matter how much she pretends she's consenting in the relationship with Shun when she sees the same thing happen to someone else she can only recognize it as the actions of a predator.

But what's really telling and kind of sad is why she chooses to frame this plan as just helping Kazuha get with Makoto, why she seems to feel only Kazuha can Love Makoto enough to Save him.  The obvious subtext to me is that like many rape victims she sees herself as tainted and unworthy of love.  She returns to Shun in episode 4 (which doesn't happen if the Twins Seduce Makoto in episode 3) because she thinks that's her only option.